Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I apologise; I am just so keen.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and Amendment 164 in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester.

I am a retread, a hereditary Peer who originally came here not very long ago, in 1981, left in 1999 and was recycled, like an old tyre, in 2014. I made my first maiden speech in 1982 and my second in 2015, on the subject of Staying Put. At that time the Minister for Children was the rather wonderful Edward Timpson, the younger brother of the Department of Justice Minister here. He had grown up in an extraordinary family. Apart from having full-blood siblings, while he was growing up his amazing parents fostered more than 90 children. So Staying Put was put in place by an individual who had a deep understanding of the issues faced by young people unfortunate enough not to be able to live with their natural or even unnatural parents. Staying Put was a result of that. The debate in 2015 was to welcome the fact that it had been extended, having been deemed such a success.

It is very fitting that now we have another Timpson in government, albeit in a different department, we again look at this and recognise how successful it has been. What we are asking for in this amendment will not involve a vast number of children or a vast amount of money. It will, however, be transformative for that small number of children. In economic terms, the benefits of giving them support up to the age of 25, if they need it, will be more than repaid by some of the problems that might cost rather more if they have to leave earlier. For all those reasons, I request that the Government look at this sympathetically and see how it can be fitted in.

On the amendment from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, in so many parts of our society there is a postcode lottery. That is not surprising given how the highly centralised country of England, with all roads leading to London, coexists with a piebald mosaic of different local authorities and different organisations of all kinds, which to some extent relish the English creative impulse to reinvent the wheel in your own image. As a result, there is considerable variation. If you asked a variety of organisations providing support for those in care or coming out of care to define succinctly, in two or three minutes, exactly what their care offer was, you would get rather different answers.

For those reasons, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, said, it would be very beneficial to have clarity about the core elements of the offer and to do everything one can to make sure it is understood and, as far as possible, complied with across the country.

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[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 98 in this group asks the same question I asked in the two previous groups: can we get local authorities to publicise what they are doing each year, to give them a benchmark to improve on each year?

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, this group ranges quite widely but there is a common theme: the things that are going wrong which ideally should not be. The question is, how do you get a handle on all of this?

There is a certain symmetry with the amendment of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, asking for a review into the disparities that care leavers are facing, which is fairly all-embracing. I suspect that quite a lot of that information is already available thanks to the MacAlister review. The right reverend Prelate’s amendment suggests that it could take up to two years—I would hope and expect it to be done a great deal quicker.

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[Lord Storey (LD)]

Oh, goodness, I would not suggest that for one moment of the current Minister—or the previous Minister.

My Written Question was:

“To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the importance of the adoption and special guardianship support fund.”


The Answer from the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Malvern, was:

“This government fully recognises the importance of support for adoptive and kinship children and families. The Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund … has been a valuable part of the support landscape for ten years. This is why we have provided £50 million of funding for the ASGSF for 2025/26, alongside £8.8 million for Adoption England, to complement the range of support available in local areas.”


I did a little further research, because that seemed to tell me that everything was okay and that this family need not worry: they were not getting any cuts. Almost half the ASGSF awards last year exceeded the new £3,000 allowance, so some children will receive cuts of almost 40%. Data shows that thousands of children will now go without the therapy they need as a result of this cut. Alongside this cut has gone a separate allocation of up to £2,500 per child per year for special assessments. This has been completely removed. Match-funding support for children with an exceptional level of need has also been removed. Previously, the ASGSF provided up to 50% of the funding for up to £30,000 per child, with the rest provided by the local authority. The consequences of these changes are that any new specialist assessment must now be paid for from the £3,000. Therapy care or support must also come within this budget, regardless of need. Support that was given may no longer be given.

Change can exacerbate issues for children with attachment and trauma-related needs, who require sustained, regular support. Building trust with a therapist takes time, but continuity of care will now be harder. Children with the most complex needs now face a highly uncertain future, which may may lead to increased exclusions, due to behavioural issues that were traditionally tackled with therapy. An increase in issues such as child-to-parent violence threatens family placements further.

This family just cannot cope any more because the funding, as we have heard, has been cut. Whether that is the element from the local authority or from the Government, I do not know, and I have been unable to look into that any further. The language we sometimes use in such cases is interesting. Need for funding is now framed as demand. Such language is insensitive to children who need the funding—SEND children as well as children who have experienced significant trauma.

I do not want to talk any longer on this. Given that we had the Statement yesterday from the Chancellor and there is a bit of extra money for education, maybe a small amount of it can be used in these cases. We all know the figures on fostering and adoption. Anybody who adopts a child—never mind two children—into their family, brings them up and supports them needs all the help we can give them. I feel lucky that, because I am in your Lordships’ House, I can use the opportunity to try to help this particular family. I hope the Minister will look sympathetically on my amendment.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I will also speak to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson. As far as this fund is concerned, I have been involved in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Adoption and Permanence as an officer and occasional co-chair for the past seven or eight years. I do it with somebody the Minister will know: Rachael Maskell, the MP for York Central. I was just scrolling back on the group’s website to see how many times we have had to launch a mini-inquiry into this fund and go through a process of appealing yet again to successive Governments to keep it going. In doing that, we have amassed each time a large amount of evidence to show just how much good this fund has done and how transformative it is for families who have adopted children, many of whom are expressing the medium- and long-term effects of the trauma they received in early life. This fund is a genuine lifesaver for those children.

I have kept in touch with a parliamentary assistant who works for an MP and is an adoptive parent. She has told me over the past few years about the intense challenges she and her husband have had with one of their adopted children and how, frankly, without the support of this fund, they were getting near crisis point and would have had to give up the adoption, so the child would have lost their adoptive family. It was the fund that enabled them to keep going. I stress to the Minister the disproportionate good that is done for these families by the expenditure of relatively small amounts of money, in the great scheme of things. The quality support and counselling that is required to help children with this level of trauma is not cheap. It requires extremely dedicated professionals who are very focused in this area. Working with children who have experienced trauma is as challenging for the practitioners as it is for the parents and the children.

I would hate to think that, over the next four years of this Government, we will have a repeat of what the all-party group experienced under previous Governments, of having to go through this cycle every two or three years of the Government threatening to reduce the fund and us having to go out and get evidence to explain just how important and life-changing it is—along with other groups, of course. In the end, the Government typically listen to the argument, but in each case it has been a challenge to get them to listen, so this group is an opportunity to remind the Minister just how transformative this fund is for the parents of children who have experienced trauma, as many adopted children have.

That leads me to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, to which I added my name. In terms of numbers, adoption is a relatively small part of looking after children who are unable to be with their birth parents. There are the large numbers in kinship care, which we talked about earlier this week, the large number—we wish it was larger—who are being fostered, and then the extremely large, expensive and distressing number of children who are in residential care.

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[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to the amendments in group 6. This is the second group of amendments in a row where I think that, quite rightly, we in this Committee will recognise the enormously important contribution made by those people willing to take children into their homes and families as a result of adoption. As other noble Lords have said, and as I know from having spoken to people who have adopted children, it is something that can bring enormous pleasure, satisfaction and completion to some families, and is often very much wished for by families. However, because of the nature of the experiences that children have gone through and the history of some of those children, notwithstanding that a family when adopting a child take on responsibility for that child and they become part of their family, I completely understand the need for there to be ongoing support for children in those circumstances.

Without going too far into history, one of the very first pieces of legislation that I did the last time round when I was a Minister was the Bill that became the Adoption and Children Act 2002. At that point, there was still quite a lot of discussion and debate about whether it was legitimate to provide any support for children in adoptive families. Notwithstanding the concerns that have been expressed as a result of these amendments, it is the case that considerable progress has been made in understanding the nature of the challenge and the reward that comes from adoption, the types of experiences that children may well have had before going into adoption, the impact that that has on families, and the requirement to provide support on an ongoing basis for children who are adopted. I recognise that the amendments in this group cover that issue of support for adoptive and kinship children, as well as how we can ensure and review the quality of adoption support that is being provided.

This is a significant area, to which the Government are committed. Although there are some difficult elements in the amendments, I am nevertheless pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and my noble friend Lord Watson have tabled them and enabled us to talk about adoption.

I reiterate the point I previously made about fostering. The fact that something is not covered in this particular piece of legislation should not be taken as some sort of statement about the significance of that issue for this Government, or about its importance for children and families. The point of legislation is to address those areas which have shortcomings in the legislative framework. Our view, certainly at this moment in time, is that the adoption legislation framework is fit for purpose, and our focus needs to be on supporting Adoption England and regional adoption agencies to improve local practice and set national standards so that there are high-quality adoption services across the country. That needs to be the priority, rather than thinking about how and whether we need to change legislation. Adoption is a priority for this Government and will remain so. Of course, most importantly, it is a vital permanence option for some children.

On the points made about the adoption and special guardianship support fund, I note the points made by the noble Earl, Lord Russell, about the history of adoption—

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

It is actually Lord Russell. I have told this to the House before, but in 1959 my grandfather and Bertrand Russell—the then Earl Russell—jointly wrote a letter to the editor of the Times that said: “Dear Sir, we would like to point out that neither of us is the other. Yours, Russell, Russell of Liverpool”.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I am glad to know that I am not the only person who has made that mistake. I apologise to the Chamber and to the noble Lord, Lord Russell.

The noble Lord talked about the important work done by the all-party group and part of the history of ensuring that there is sufficient focus through government activity to provide the necessary support for adoptive families. The adoption and special guardianship support fund has given valuable support to over 53,000 individual children over the 10 years that it has been in place. Many have received support for multiple years, which is a point that I will return to when talking about the criteria.

The Government have continued to support the ASGSF; we provided £50 million for 2025-26. There has been an increase in demand—some noble Lords argued it was an increase in need. Then you face a challenge, regardless of how much money is allocated, as to whether you provide more support for fewer children and families, or ensure a level of support for a larger number of children and families.

The revised funding criteria effective from April 2025 will continue to enable children to receive an excellent level of support, many at similar levels to before, and £3,000-worth of therapy remains a substantial amount of support. On the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, about the assessment, children and families receive this support over several years and I think I am right in saying that this £3,000 would include the assessment. Perhaps the next year or the year after that, it would not be necessary to redo the assessment, and £3,000 would fund 19 to 20 hours of therapy on current average costings. As I say, there are many children and families who are receiving similar levels of support as before, although I recognise the case brought to the attention of this Committee by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, where families have seen that as a cut in the provision that they have been able to receive.

Local authorities can continue to supplement available funding locally through the mainstream children’s services budget, if assessments deem this necessary. As I have said, the revised criteria will ensure that all children can continue to receive support. It is important to recognise the significance of the contribution that this support provides, even if in some cases it does not feel as though it is enough support to respond to the considerable challenges that families are facing. For that reason, the Government recognise that recent changes to funding levels came unexpectedly, and therefore local areas had limited time to plan.

I hope I can provide some reassurance that applications under the revised criteria are now being not only received but processed as speedily as possible, so that children can receive the therapy that they need. The Government will continue to assess the implementation of adoption support arrangements, including the adoption and special guardianship support fund. We will be taking forward discussions on the delivery and management of funds in future years. Across the department, we have heard the concerns that have been expressed in the Committee this evening and, most importantly, that have come from the families affected.

The ASGSF, like other government expenditure, is subject to business planning decisions following the spending review, and these decisions will obviously need to take into account the full range of government priorities. The ASGSF is not a statutory arrangement. We believe that it should remain flexible to provide an effective service, and that it would not be helpful—as proposed in these amendments—for decisions on funding levels to be made in isolation from consideration of other budgets. However, as I say, I recognise the strength of feeling expressed today and by others outside Parliament.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I have just checked, and I think the Minister mentioned that, with the £3,000, the average number of sessions that would be allowed is about 12.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

It would be 19.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

The range of applications for the support fund over the last few years has typically been between 20 and 50 sessions per annum, so it is right on the margin.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I did say that it would fund 19 to 20 hours. I also made the point that this is something that does not happen within only one year; it is something that can continue, in order to provide support.

However, I also said that I recognise the strength of feeling expressed today and by others outside Parliament. We will of course take these issues into account when making decisions about how to allocate funding from the DfE budget for future years. I hope this will assure noble Lords that we are considering these issues very carefully.

On Amendment 145 in the name of my noble friend Lord Watson, I agree with my noble friend that adoption support should be high-quality. Of course, Ofsted already reviews how well authorities are delivering adoption services and publishes reports on each authority every three years. The Secretary of State has powers under the Education and Inspections Act 2006 to require Ofsted to provide information on or conduct an inspection of any specified function of the local authority that falls within its remit, which may include adoption support services. Ofsted reports regularly on adoption support in local authorities, children’s social care inspection reports and on adoption agencies.